Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @01:26PM
from the closer-look dept.

In their fight against Uber, London's taxi drivers claim a distinct advantage: They must forgo GPS and navigate the huge city entirely from memory. CNET: Put in place in 1865, the Knowledge exam requires cabbies to navigate between any two points in central London without following a map or GPS. It can take four years to learn the information and pass a series of stringent oral tests. It's a grueling process unmatched by any training taxi drivers have to face anywhere else, and it's the most arduous thing Pearson's [Editor's note: a driver; used as anecdote in the story] ever done. "My uncle was a cab driver and he encouraged me to give it a go," he said. "But I still didn't realize how hard it would be."

Despite the difficulty of mastering it, cabbies proudly defend the Knowledge as a critical part of their job, something technology can't replace. They say it sets them apart from ride-hailing services like Uber, whose drivers don't have to learn the Knowledge, and they believe it allows them to deliver a superior level of service. But ever since mapping apps arrived on phones and GPS-wielding Uber drivers exploded into London in 2012, the Knowledge has faced a volatile future. Should cabbies have to spend years of their life memorizing every inch of London when they can simply punch in a destination on a screen and be guided? Absolutely, say the drivers I spoke with.

Taxi drivers are regulated in London, they invest a great deal of time and money in gaining The Knowledge so they can do the job, and part of that is being required to identify efficient routes. If an inspector takes a ride and the cabbie tries what you're suggesting then their career is in real danger. There aren't many people that stupid in the industry.

But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route? The computer can know much more about the current traffic conditions and provide a much better route. The cab driver has to be smart enough to know when the computer is making a really bad error, but for the most part, the computer will probably come up with a really good result. You might end up with cab drivers who are better at being drivers or who are more courteous to the public rather than picking only people

But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route?

If a computer existed that was any good at doing that, then yes. But right now, they aren't even close. You are placing way too much faith in their ability to know current traffic conditions and adapt optimally to them.

This is a theory-vs-practice issue. In theory, all of these objections could be resolved. There's no inherent technical limitation that says you couldn't do the sort of thing I assume you're imagining here. But in practice, most in-car navigation systems are pretty awful in a city like London. In many cases, even if you don't know the back roads and detours, you really are better off just planning a sensible route in advance and sticking to it unless something obviously catastrophic has happened. And if you do know the roads the way a London cabbie does, you can adapt on the fly way better than any current navigation systems anyway.

You don't know London, I get it. You don't care about the traffic conditions right now. You care about the traffic conditions in 5 minutes. And believe me, there can be a HUGE difference between those two things.

You don't know London, I get it. You don't care about the traffic conditions right now. You care about the traffic conditions in 5 minutes. And believe me, there can be a HUGE difference between those two things.

But wouldn't it make more sense for the cab driver to use a computer to find the best route? The computer can know much more about the current traffic conditions and provide a much better route. The cab driver has to be smart enough to know when the computer is making a really bad error, but for the most part, the computer will probably come up with a really good result. You might end up with cab drivers who are better at being drivers or who are more courteous to the public rather than picking only people

Or bettter yet, used to track marketing data. Then sold. How many people would you like to know you like strip clubs, retail MJ, or take a lot of trips to the liquor store? It could have job and insurance implication.

Any place and time with nontrivial traffic, the most direct reasonable route, and the fastest reasonable route, tend to differ. I tend to know both (without GPS) for anyplace within about 25 miles of me. If I were a cabbie (or Uber driver) I'd let my fare know and let him or her choose.

Driving while looking at a GPS is clearly more dangerous than driving without looking at a screen of some kind. I prefer to take taxis because they tend to know where they're going more than the fake-taxi people (Uber, Lyft).

Anyone who's tried to navigate central London using a SatNav's audible instructions knows all too well that the instructions are frequently too early, too late, or just plain confused by unusual road layouts, resulting in ambiguous or misleading spoken instructions. I have reached a point on several occasions where I have completely turned off a navigation system in London because it was not only unhelpful but actively dangerous.

I am now firmly of the view that any in-car navigation devices with sound shoul

My son is a Fireman and 10 years ago decided he wanted to drive the truck. He had to be able to drive to any address in the city without using a map or navigation app. He spent a lot of time staring at the big map mounted on the wall.

I was in London last year, and used Uber extensively. Most of the time it worked out fine, but there were a few spectacular failures. In particular, a ride to Kensington Palace dropped us off at a point that was more than a half hour's walk from the Palace. As we walked, we passed an intersection that was only a few hundred yards from the Palace entrance. I'm pretty sure a real cab driver would have dropped us at the closest point.

If it were my livelyhood and I already put in the effort, I'd see that as an excellent way to keep out competitors. But you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865, and how easy GPS (possibly with live updates on road conditions) makes things nowadays...

... you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865

Eventually it will be impossible. Look at Shanghai, it's 3 times the size of London by population and 4 times the area, with constant construction that makes whatever you learned a year ago completely obsolete. If your Shanghai cabbie doesn't have a GPS, get ready to give them turn-by-turn directions.

I spend quite a bit of time in Shanghai - I lived there for 6 years, and I have family there. I was just there last week. Used cabs several time, just told them the name of the business or the cross streets I wanted and we got there, no issues. No GPS, no nav needed... As impressive as London cabbies are, Shanghai cabbies (especially those with 3+ stars) are a whole different league!

There was a documentary about this on TV, not sure what channel, but I saw it just a few days ago, about how the size of the actually grew on those learning to sharpen their memory like this. Scans where taken before and after, and the results where quite astonishing.

I kinda believe it too, I got a job at a huge corporation, where I was set to do an almost seemingly impossible task - namely learn 25K pages of information about their infrastructure so I could properly map and redirect requests to where it was needed + solve IT solution tasks on the spot if possible instead of redirecting, the answer where all in these 25K pages. At first it was like, I'm never ever gonna be able to do this, after a month I was - I can't believe I can actually remember this much, now I actually believe it can be done, I still have to console the 25K pages manual - but it's rarer and rarer, and my problem solving rate is up to 96% correct now.

What's even more interesting, is that this job has had a profound effect on my private life as well. I've done much more to clean up my life, making sure important things like personal pension, insurance, savings, purchases are done correctly instead of wasting it on "oh, I don't care". My gaming life is amazing in comparison to before, I've reached levels I couldn't even dream of later.

Anyone who's ever used a London cabby will value the brevity of the journey when you ask for a recommended hotel near a certain landmark/street, or if you're in a rush to get to a meeting in an obscure area and there's a traffic jam on the normal route. It's shocking how little local knowledge can be required elsewhere.

Well, in this case the depth of knowledge is not a safety issue, as it might be in someone's fireman example above. At most, it provides customers with a sense of confidence that their driver knows where they're going -- which some people value more, some people less.

I would say, let customers decide whether this knowledge is worth it by giving them the choice. Otherwise, it's a barrier to entry to a restricted group of drivers so that they enjoy a monopoly and the power to price their taxi services a

There's the notion that passing the test signals an ability roughly correlated with character and intelligence that provides a first pass filter for applicants. Whether greater emphasis on this notion is still worth the premium is certainly debatable.

Yes,it might be nice to be able to say "that chineese restaurant next to the flowershop across the church" and have the cabby jnow where it is, but in all my life I had an address when I took a taxi.

What I like is the cars themselves, made specially as a taxi, not just a car where you sit inthe back. Much easier to get in and out of. THAT is service I like to pay for. Bit like first and second class in a plane.

Last time I rode a cab the guy seemed to have no knowledge of the city whatsoever and I had to give him specific directions the entire way down to what lanes to drive in. He basically used me as his GPS.

In any other job, you have to carry the qualifications of that job. If I'm a software developer, I have to know and understand the languages which I work with, in great detail, if I don't, then I'm really just a script kiddy, taking code off stack overflow. Why would or should the taxi industry be any different?

Of course anyone is going to claim they are absolutely indispensable when their livelihood is challenged. In the early 20th century, white-only unions lobbied for a minimum wage to shut out black construction workers who were willing to underbid the prevailing union wage.

The Knowledge was obviously a great idea in the London of 1865, when the only way to be a cabdriving professional wa to know every inch of the city. It's also great for screwing the passenger in more or less subtle ways. Given an intimate knowledge of city streets, you "take the passenger for a ride" without making even a long-term resident aware that this is what you're doing.

The psychology behind The Knowledge is exactly what kept Morse code in use as a hazing mechanism in ham radio for years after it had

Uberâ(TM)s app *routinely* picks long and slow routes in London. I frequently have to redirect the driver based on my own knowledge or Waze. And of course thereâ(TM)s absolutely zero transparency about fare calculations â" I have to trust that the fare was calculated the way it was promised to be calculated. Meters in black cabs are regulated by a third party, by contrast.

As someone who lived in London for a few years, and who took rides in London cabs in numerous occasions, this come across as a desperate attempt by the London cab lobby to delay the inevitable. Uber and Lyft is already pointing out that the official cab service is overpriced, and not all that good. But this is just the beginning, for it won't be too long now until autonomous cabs, far better at memorizing the city ways and plotting routes, will be taking over. The death knell for London cabbies has already

You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage. A human navigator can't see ahead for optimizing against current traffic patterns as can GPS. Plus, imagine all the other things they could have done with their time and effort besides memorizing obsolete information. No wonder this stupid crony industry is going bankrupt.

"A human navigator can't see ahead for optimizing against current traffic patterns as can GPS"

Really now? Anyone I have ever met knows things like, "If I don't leave in 15 minutes the 340 is going to be crowded, but I could take the 225. The 225 is longer but would end up being faster". And " since it is the holidays and there is a game that lets out soon, I'll take the 720, use high street, go through Clear Water subdivision, get on the 225 and miss the surge".

I know that after 3pm every 5 minutes I delay is another minute spent in traffic on the 101 Pima. After 4, it's a minute delay for every minute I waste getting out of work.

What I cannot know without real-time traffic data is that an accident has blocked it anywhere between Cactus and Thomas, or between the 202 and the 60. Those become huge delays. The radio traffic reports on the 10s give me stale info, usually only reporting a half hour after the accident is reported, and for two hours after it is cleared.

Maybe in Manhattan. Not the outer boroughs. There is no excess capacity, so any unusual delay due to construction or accidents, the loss of even a single lane on a highway or major artery, can cause gridlock miles away. And even on Manhattan, there are constant wrecks on the GWB, in the tunnels, the FDR, and other freeways/parkways. A problem on the outbound roads like the LIRR or NJ Turnpike or any other, even many miles from Manhattan, can gridlock Manhattan also. I've seen all of the above, on weeke

I've had 3 experiences with GPS. On 2 occasions, I was trying to find a place I was semi-familiar with, didn't like the route it said, and the route I took turned out to be shorter. The 3rd time was with a friend trying to find somewhere he hadn't been in years. The GPS glitched several times, sending him down several wrong streets before he finally followed his gut and found the place.

It may come as news to you, mate, but London is not in Seattle. There is no law against balack cab drivers having a GPS, or even two or three. But they need to be able to find every single one of a vast number of landmarks, and the quickest way between them, when the GPS is not working (I have had it claim I was doing 700 MPH over Marylebone, while I would be happy to even to 7MPH).

I use my GPS all the time. Most of the time it just works, so much so that in the odd times it doesn't work, I'm shocked.

However, there was this one time I was on the Freeway when the GPS told me to get off the freeway and take a side street, where I normally would just stay on the road. However, I took the advice, and it routed me around a brand new accident, using side streets. The detour took less than 4 minutes, and routed me around stopped traffic.

No. My navigator knows _all_ that, it knows all the distance differences up to an inch and doesn't have to guess and also all the accidents that just happened all over the city, all the planned and unplanned works happening just now, the buildings on fire blocking traffic and, thanks to Google, at what speed all the cars on the road are driving _right_ _now_.

The Knowledge is only required for black cabs, they do not have a dispatcher.

If you have a dispatcher then you're a minicab and the dispatch office will have considered the route and set the price before the driver even knows about the job. They aren't allowed to pick up passengers off the street.

This is a UK-centric article, and our taxis are licensed differently to yours in the US.

Coming back from Las Vegas over Thanksgiving weekend, the 15 was backed up for hours. We went through Pahrump and saved a few hours. But then coming into Baker, Google said to use Well Road to avoid the main road. I started to head that way - but Well Road is literally a washed-out stream. As I was about to turn onto it - I noticed a car, about 100 yards down the road, nose-down in a ditch that bisected the "road". I guess if you had a jacked-up 4x4 then Well Road could be navigable, but in the Ford Mu

A few years ago I was headed to a job and I already knew the way there, but I was using my Garmin to give me some idea of the ETA. Approaching an intersection where I knew I was going to be turning left, Garmin told me to "take a right and make a u-turn". Some people would blindly follow such directions, but a human who has been that way before would know better.

To this day Garmin wants me to take a dead-end dirt road to come home from Guntersville, Alabama. What's up with that?

And yet, I've seen many reports/documentaries/reviews over the years that have objectively compared SatNavs with London cabbies, and the cabbies always win, sometimes by a comically wide margin.

Having tried to navigate central London using a top-of-the-range SatNav, including all the whizzy new real-time this and traffic report that, this result does not surprise me in the slightest. The route-planning algorithms aren't even close to the same standard as a proper London cabbie, and their real-time feeds are neither accurate enough nor fast enough to know when to stick with the main route and when to divert along the back streets.

Generally the routing algorithms suffer the most when the routes have to take curved roads, have multiple speed changes, and are limited by bridges and other obstructions. Rectilinear road layouts are very forgiving.

So London, San Diego, and Boston are routing nightmares, New York less so, and Phoenix pretty simple. LA in the middle. Kuala Lumpur is unforgivable.

As an obvious example, I'd estimate that my current SatNav shows an incorrect speed limit on at least 20% of roads I travel on (percentage by distance) in cities. This frequently leads to directions that I know in my own city are terrible, and I can only assume from the odd routes it often suggests in other cities that it's not doing any better there.

Even on long-distance main roads, a SatNav might not understand that the reason traffic is slowing is becaus

Those cabbies have scanners, radios, and a dispatcher I wouldn't be surprised if they know about some accidents before emergency services. One sees the accident and radios it in and they all know to re-route accordingly, same with traffic. It's not like they are alone and have no information they just know the streets and businesses and don't need to use GPS.

I don't know what you were searching for, but several searches I tried using terms like London, black cab and satnav turned up several of the older ones immediately. There was another one on TV much more recently that had the same outcome, but I'm afraid I can't remember which programme it was so it's hard to find that one.

Having tried to navigate central London using a top-of-the-range SatNav, including all the whizzy new real-time this and traffic report that, this result does not surprise me in the slightest. The route-planning algorithms aren't even close to the same standard as a proper London cabbie, and their real-time feeds are neither accurate enough nor fast enough to know when to stick with the main route and when to divert along the back streets.

Have you tried Waze?

The truth is that V2V is coming, and the automakers are actually building alliances that will let them share the V2V data, so Waze is going away (whether they know it or not) and that functionality is going to be offered by every vehicle's navigation system. Even vehicles without autonomy are going to carry V2V systems (Cadillac has started deploying them already, largely as a gimmick, but even so) and the available information on traffic conditions is going to be staggering. It will be

The reason I ask if you've tried Waze, though, is that responding to traffic conditions in realtime is its whole job.

The data Waze uses comes from drivers. There is a certain irony in the situation where a driver who has just been entering the location of a traffic stop is then stopped by the same officer and ticketed for using a mobile electronic device while driving, which is quite possible in states with new, draconian distracted driving laws.

If everyone were to use and obey them, I'd bet the traffic congestion would be reduced and everyone would get places faster. Lots of people taking creative routes trying to get there just a little faster increases the friction in the system and slows the overall system down.

Instead of having them memorize maps, they should ban creative routing altogether and make them stick to planned rout

Algorithms don't obey speed laws. They may base their routing on them. There are increasing numbers of stories about neighborhoods that are being inundated by rush-hour traffic being routed off the throughways and through their residential areas because the routing algorithm sees that as a faster path.

And yet, I've seen many reports/documentaries/reviews over the years that have objectively compared SatNavs with London cabbies, and the cabbies always win, sometimes by a comically wide margin.

And yet, that's not how real people use cabbies. Many of us need to be taken across Central London, not just within Central London (which is the only knowledge they're actually tested on).

This is not that I begrudge London cabbies for being more knowledgeable in general and for having lower turnover. I think that's great! But I also think they should drop the attitude and carry an internet capable phone with Google Waze or Google Maps on it. After all, their A-to-Z guide can only take them so far. That guid

We've tried using Google Maps on my wife's phone while I'm driving, plenty of times. It's just as bad in inner cities as the built-in things or the standalone satnavs like TomTom.

Also, why do so many people apparently believe London cabbies somehow can't use all the same technologies as everyone else, in addition to their expert knowledge of the central area? It's not as if they're mutually exclusive.

So why not have a bank of Knowledge Holders back at headquarters who are plotting routes in real time? The cabbies in the field wouldn't know the difference between a computer generated route and a human generated route. You don't need every cabbie to have the Knowledge to make it available widely.

Not a failure in regulation, Just regulations that are being replaced by technology.Being that GPS is used the the UK, using US infrastructure, while we have had good relations for about 200 years. It wouldn't make sense to put your infrastructure purely in the hands of a foreign power, no matter how friendly they are.

Not at all. I would much rather be driven by someone who is proud of the job they do, who is committed enough that they are willing to spend the time to understand the layout of a large complex city and who also has the mental capacity to do so. The benefit of this test is not purely restricted to navigational know-how.

Do you not think that we don't bust our asses to create the best product we can for you? Millions of man-hours from people killing themselves with long hours have already gone into creating the self-driving systems that show promise for dramatically reducing traffic fatalities in another couple of decades and enabling many new industries. Millions more will be spent before the job is done.

Driving by GPS is fine for areas you don't know. But you drive a LOT more intelligently and safer in areas you DO KNOW.

You know complicated left/right/left maneuvers and which lane to be in at each step, often in cases faster than the GPS has time to update the display after your last manueover and recite the instructions for the next one.

I used Lyft just last night, here in San Francisco. Not only could GPS not locate me accurately (it had me across the street and 7 addresses up, this is on Polk at California), but the driver's car drifted around too... GPS doesn't work really well in all environments. Or when the weather gets really bad...

I've done a fair amount of field work. GPS has always failed my when I needed it the most. Either non-existent routes, or unable to calibrate due too poor hits from satellites. Any place where the signal is blocked. This is why I always have a map back up and when in the field a compass as well.

And a GPS app has no way to give you directions to a description (not an address) of the location.

Nonsense. It's called Google. They certainly aren't exposing all of the metadata they've created to the public. If they don't already know which buildings are which color and what's across the street from them, it's mostly a matter of burning processor time since they have all the data they need to find that out in their databases already. Maybe you can't search for buildings that way with google yet, but it's only a matter of time. And of course, if someone has blogged about such and such being across the

Black cab drivers have to learn the knowledge often committing up to 3 years driving around London to learn streets and locations.

Aren't you just restating what the summary said?

Not quite, because the summary didn't have this "black cab drivers" trick for those unfamiliar with London, causing a brief impression that something racist was going on. He added some brilliant confusion. It was master-quality misdirection and the least we could do is applaud.